Double Cross: The True Story Of The D-Day Spies

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Recording from Ben Macintyre’s talk, ‘Double Cross: The True Story of The D-Day Spies’ for CVHF, Sunday, 30th June 2013.

D-Day, 6 June 1944, the turning point of the Second World War, was a victory of arms. But it was also a triumph for a different kind of operation: one of deceit. At the heart of the deception was the ‘Double Cross System’, a team of double agents whose bravery, treachery, greed and inspiration succeeded in convincing the Nazis that Calais and Norway, not Normandy, were the targets of the 150,000-strong Allied invasion force. These were not conventional warriors, but their masterpiece of duplicity saved thousands of lives. In this talk, bestselling author, Ben MacIntyre, tells the astonishing tale of Operation Fortitude, the D-Day deception plan, recounted with his usual encyclopaedic knowledge and driest of wits. This is a talk for all fans of espionage and derring-do.

Henry III

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Recording from David Carpenter’s talk ‘Henry III’ at CVHF on Tuesday, 25th June 2013.

The Festival is always keen to open eyes to lesser-known episodes and characters from history, which is why we included an event about Henry III, the son of King John and one of our longest-reigning but least known monarchs. To talk on this fascinating man, we asked Professor David Carpenter, one of the world’s leading experts on King Henry’s reign. Much of his reign was spent fighting the barons over Magna Carta, yet under Henry, England prospered. He also made Westminster his seat of government and expanded the abbey. David Carpenter is a superb lecturer and brings his deep knowledge and passion for the subject in a talk that reveals a critical but often forgotten period of our history.

IQ2 Debate: Ancients v Moderns

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Ancient History Matters More Than Modern History. A recording from the IQ2 Debate at CVHF on 29th June 2013 with Boris Johnson, Tom Holland, Dan Snow and Jeremy Black. Chair: Edward Stourton.

What have the Romans ever done for us? Monty Python’s eternal question is put to the vote in this year’s IQ2 debate. This dazzling cast of historians pitted their knowledge and wit against each other in arguing whether ancient or modern history is more instructive and relevant to the times we live in. In this blizzard of repartee in our second, annual IQ2 debate, the audience got to speak and vote on some of the critical questions of history.

The Brother Gardeners: Botany, Empire and the Birth of an Obsession

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A recording from Andrea Wulf’s CVHF talk on Sunday, 30th June 2013.

One January morning in 1734, cloth merchant Peter Collinson hurried down to the docks at London’s Custom House to collect cargo just arrived from John Bartram in the American colonies. But it was not bales of cotton that awaited him, but plants and seeds… Over the next forty years, Bartram would send hundreds of American species to England, where Collinson was one of a handful of men who would foster a national obsession and change the gardens of Britain forever: Philip Miller, author of the bestselling Gardeners Dictionary; the Swede Carl Linnaeus, whose standardised botanical nomenclature popularised botany; the botanist-adventurer Joseph Banks and his colleague Daniel Solander who both explored the strange flora of Tahiti and Australia on Captain Cook’s Endeavour. In this charming and utterly fascinating talk, Andrea Wulf tells the story of these men – friends, rivals, enemies, united by a passion for plants. History and gardening meet in this telling of the birth of Britain’s green-fingered obsession.

Three Kings: How Alfred the Great & His Family Made England

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Recording from Michael Wood’s CVHF talk on Friday, 28th June 2013.

Michael Wood is one of our most enduringly popular television historians. Although he has crossed continents and travelled seas to tell us the stories of ancient civilisations and even Nazi cults, his first love in history was the Anglo-Saxons. In this talk, he tells the amazing story of Alfred the Great and his family, a tale that takes us across the British Isles in the Viking Age, to Rome and beyond, and to the Battle of Brunanburh, when England finally became one.

People’s DNA: A People’s History

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Recording from Alistair Moffat’s talk ‘People’s DNA: A People’s History at CVHF on Thursday, 27th June 2013.

Hidden inside all of us – every human being on Earth – is the story of our ancestry. Printed on our DNA are the origins of our lineages, the time in history and prehistory when they arose, and the epic journeys people have made across the globe. Based on exciting new research involving the most wide-ranging sampling of DNA ever made in Britain, Alistair Moffat will show how all of us who live on these islands are immigrants. The last ice age erased any trace of more ancient inhabitants, and the ancestors of everyone who now lives in Britain came here after the glaciers retreated and the land greened once more. This talk is about an epic, often profoundly moving and astonishing, journey. From Africa to caves in southern France and across Europe, Alistair Moffat will reveal a very different and new history of Britain.

The Great Adventurer: Patrick Leigh Fermor

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A recording from the talk ‘The Great Adventurer: Patrick Leigh Fermor by Artemis Cooper at CVHF on Thursday 27th June 2013.

Patrick Leigh Fermor led an extraordinary life. A war hero whose exploits in Crete are legendary, he was also widely acclaimed as one of the greatest travel writers of our times, notably for his books about his walk across pre-war Europe, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water. He was a self-educated polymath, a lover of Greece and the best company in the world. Artemis Cooper has drawn on years of interviews and conversations with Paddy and his closest friends as well as having complete access to his archives. Her beautifully crafted biography became a best-seller and was widely praised. Here she tells Paddy Leigh Fermor’s story and explains why this man of such extraordinary gifts was such a wonderful personality and why he inspired such passionate friendships.

This year Artemis Cooper returns to CVHF on 26 June. Her talk, Cairo in the War, 1939 – 1945 she will relate the progress and fortunes of the war in the desert against the background of legendary parties and a hotbed of spies and intrigue.

Hugh Trevor-Roper

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Hugh_Trevor-RoperHugh Trevor-Roper was one of the most famous and admired British historians of the twentieth century.

His account of the Last Days of Hitler, based on the most exciting (and dangerous) sort of investigative journalism, shortly after the end of the war, is a classic; while his essays, reviews and letters (many edited by Richard Davenport-Hines) are gems of historical insight, imagination and literary style.

Notoriously, he authenticated the forged ‘Hitler Diaries’ – hoisted by his own petard, many said, in light of his scathing attacks on colleagues who erred. Yet the ‘Hitler Diaries’ debacle was in fact a tragic mistake which Trevor-Roper tried to correct before The Times splashed its scoop and his reputation took a body blow.

Either way, the work, the life and the ideas of Hugh Trevor-Roper greatly outweigh this single episode. He was an Oxford historian (Regius Professor no less) when such roles had influence beyond the ‘dreaming spires’ of that ancient university.

Married, late in life, to Field Marshal Haig’s daughter, he was a member of the establishment who ran Harold Macmillan’s campaign to become Chancellor of Oxford and later explained, politely, to Margaret Thatcher that she was entirely wrong about German re-unification.

Above all he was very funny, with a ironic and irreverent view of humanity that could rival Gibbon.

His letters, which have been edited by Richard Davenport-Hines, are as amusing and enlightening as this brilliant man himself.

The CVHF talk, ‘The Five Lives of Hugh Trevor-Roper’ by Richard Davenport-Hines is on 26th June

richard-davenporthinesRichard Davenport-Hines is co-editor of One Hundred Letters from Hugh Trevor-Roper, and previously edited Trevor-Roper’s Letters from Oxford (addressed to Bernard Berenson) and his Wartime Journals. In his CVHF talk on 26th June, Richard Davenport-Hines will show how these letters reveal him as a historian, a controversialist, a public intellectual, a ‘backroom boy’ in British intelligence, a connoisseur, a traveller and a countryman.

 

Anne Boleyn’s last secret

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Why was the queen executed with a sword, rather than an axe?

Anne Boleyn's SecretWith his wife, Anne Boleyn, in the Tower, Henry VIII considered every detail of her coming death, poring over plans for the scaffold. As he did so he made a unique decision. Anne, alone among all victims of the Tudors, was to be beheaded with a sword and not the traditional axe. The question that has, until now, remained unanswered is — why?

Historians have suggested that Henry chose the sword because Anne had spent time in France, where the nobility were executed this way, or because it offered a more dignified end. But Henry did not care about Anne’s feelings. Anne was told she was to be beheaded on the morning of 18 May, and then kept waiting until noon before being told she was to die the next day. At the root of Henry’s decision was Henry thinking not about Anne, but about himself.

When Henry VIII fell in love with Anne in 1526, he represented an ideal of chivalric kingship come to life: handsome, pious and martial. In Europe it was said ‘his great nobleness and fame’ was ‘greater than any Prince since King Arthur’. There could have been no greater compliment for Henry: Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur was woven into the Tudor family myths. The first Tudor king, Henry VII, had claimed the Welsh bloodline of the Tudors made them the heirs to King Arthur. He even gave the name to his eldest son. Only when the boy died, shortly after being married to Catherine of Aragon, did Henry VII lose his enthusiasm for the Arthurian myths. Henry VIII turned to them again.

In 1516 Henry VIII had the round table which still hangs in the Great Hall of Winchester Castle, and which it was believed dated back to Camelot, painted with the figure of Arthur bearing Henry’s features under an Imperial crown. It was Henry’s belief that England was, historically, an empire, and he Arthur’s heir, that later became the basis for his claim to an imperium — command — over church as well as state. It justified the break with Rome and the Pope that allowed him to marry Anne in 1533.

But, like Catherine of Aragon, Anne failed to give Henry the son he wanted, and when she miscarried in January 1536, he lost hope that she would. He began complaining that Anne had seduced him into marrying her — an accusation carrying suggestions of witchcraft — and he showed a growing interest in her maid of honour, Jane Seymour.

Dissolving the marriage to Anne was a complex issue for Henry, who feared it would re-confirm ‘the authority of the Pope’. But Anne was also making an enemy of Thomas Cromwell, his chief minister, with whom she quarrelled over the burning issue of what to do with the money raised from the dissolution of the monasteries. Anne hoped to see the money go to charitable enterprises, while Cromwell intended to pour it into the king’s pocket.

On 2 April, the chaplain in charge of Anne’s charitable giving delivered a sermon at court that suggested a comparison between Cromwell and a character from the bible called Haman, the corrupt minister of an Old Testament king. The sermon noted threateningly that Haman had died on the scaffold. Anne’s anger with Henry was also evident during these weeks. Her brother, George, had let slip that she had complained Henry had ‘neither talent nor vigour’ in bed. Some wondered if she had a lover, a view encouraged by her sometimes outrageous flirting — and it was to be this that triggered her downfall.

On Saturday 28 April, when the king’s body servant Sir Henry Norris came to her household, Anne asked him why he had not yet married the maid of honour he kept visiting. When Norris shrugged that he preferred to ‘tarry a time’, Anne joked: ‘You look for dead men’s shoes, for if ought came to the king but good, you would look to have me.’ Imagining the death of the king was a treasonous offence, and Norris replied, aghast, that ‘if he should have any such thought, he would [wish] his head were off’.

The next day a young court musician called Mark Smeaton, who had been seen moping after Anne earlier on the Saturday, was taken secretly to Cromwell’s house for questioning. Anne’s conversation with Norris gave Cromwell a means of accusing her of treason. But Norris was unlikely to confess to adultery and so make a charge of plotting the king’s murder plausible. A weaker man was required if Anne’s chastity was to be besmirched — and Smeaton was to fill that role. Before that evening Henry had learned that Smeaton had confessed to adultery with the queen. He postponed, but did not cancel, a trip he had planned to take with Anne to Calais in June. He could not be certain what else Cromwell might uncover. The next morning, May Day 1536, he attended a joust with Anne at Greenwich Palace. As the tournament ended, a message was passed to the king. Abruptly, he rose from his seat and left for Westminster by horse, taking a handful of attendants. Norris was called to join him, while an astonished Anne was left to oversee the closing of the competition.

As the king’s party rode off, Henry asked Norris if he had committed adultery with the queen, offering to pardon him if he confessed. Norris, a fellow member of the Order of the Garter, Henry’s equivalent of the knights of the round table, found himself cast in the role of Lancelot to Anne’s Guinevere. He desperately asserted his innocence. It did him no good. He joined Smeaton in the Tower that night. Anne was taken there the following day along with her brother, accused of adultery with his sister. Two further courtiers would be convicted at trial of plotting Henry’s death with the queen.

As Henry’s sexual inadequacies were paraded during the trials, he responded by advertising his virility, staying out all hours, banqueting with beautiful girls. In private, however, he comforted himself in a different way, obsessing over the details of Anne’s coming death. In Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, Guinevere was sentenced to death by burning. Henry decided Anne would be beheaded with a sword — the symbol of Camelot, of a rightful king, and of masculinity. Historians argue over whether Anne was really guilty of adultery, and whether Henry or Cromwell was more responsible for her destruction. But the choice of a sword to kill Anne reflects one certain fact: Henry’s overweening vanity and self-righteousness.

‘I heard say the executioner was very good and I have but a little neck,’ Anne said the day before her execution, and laughing, she put her hands round her throat. It was, at least, to be a quick death: her head fell with one blow, her eyes and lips still moving as it landed on the straw.

This article first appeared in the print edition of The Spectator magazine, dated 17 August 2013

leanda-delisleAcclaimed author, Leanda de Lisle will be speaking at CVHF on 25th June 2014 –  Tudor: The Family Story.

Looking at the Tudor dynasty from before the Wars of the Roses up to the death of Elizabeth I, she will present new perspectives on key figures and show a family who will stop at nothing to secure and protect their own bloodline.


Tudor: The Family Story is published in paperback on 5 June 2014 by Vintage (£9.99)

The Dark Charisma of Adolf Hitler: Leading Millions Into The Abyss

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Recording from Laurence Rees’ talk for CVHF, Monday, 24th June 2013.

Adolf Hitler was an unlikely leader – fuelled by hate, incapable of forming normal human relationships, unwilling to debate political issues – and yet he commanded enormous support. So how was it possible that Hitler became such an attractive figure to millions of people? That is the important question at the core of this talk by award-winning filmmaker and historian, Laurence Rees. The Holocaust, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, the outbreak of World War 2 – all these cataclysmic events and more can be laid at Hitler’s door. Hitler was a war criminal arguably without precedent in the history of the world. Yet, as many who knew him confirm, Hitler was still able to exert a powerful influence over the people who encountered him. In this absorbing talk, based on the work done for his acclaimed BBC series, Laurence Rees examines the nature of Hitler’s appeal, and reveals the role Hitler’s supposed ‘charisma’ played in his success.